Console Games Will Soon Include TV-Style Adverts, Which Is Super Gross
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Featured Image Credit: EA
You know when you're in the middle of watching a great show or movie on live TV and you have to cut away from the action to watch five minutes of adverts for products you don't give a single crap about? You know how much that annoys you, yeah? Great! Now imagine that happening while you're playing video games that you've paid £70 for.
According to a recent report from Axios (via Kotaku), a company with the super-cool and not entirely awful name playerWON has signed a deal with companies like EA to find a way to bring TV-style adverts to console games. Uh oh.
Can you imagine playing a game like Battlefield 2042 later this year and seeing other players get special treatment because they watched an advert? It's super gross.
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playerWON describes itself a "a first-of-its-kind in-game advertising platform," and have apparently been testing out their ad-based technology for over a year now. The company feels its now ready to implement/inflict its vision in actual console games. The one very small upside of this idea is that the ads apparently aren't designed to interrupt you in the middle of a game. Instead, you would choose to watch an advert and the game would then "release rewards to the player". Ew. Ew ew ew ew.
The aforementioned testing took place in the free-to-play battle arena game Smite last year, with predictably gross results. Data from this experiment showed that players were 22% more likely to play a game and spend money in that game (11%) if they watched in-game ads that granted access to special perks.
Emboldened by this success, playerWON "plans to launch in-game ads in roughly a dozen more games by the year's end". I do not see this ending well. For us, I mean. The people behind this are clearly about to get very rich.